San Francisco, California based Startup Genome has been around since Feb 2011, providing startups with data and benchmarking tools to evaluate their progress against other startups and make informed decisions about their business.

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They began by testing their model on data provided by 50 startups, then put out a survey in which more than 650 startups participated.

Their first “Startup Genome Report” released last year was a big hit, providing a framework for understanding the success and failure of startups. By September, they had launched their main benchmarking tool ‚Äì the Startup Genome Compass, which is based on data from over 3200 internet startups and has been used by more than 13,000 companies to evaluate performance and decide whether to push the pedal and make the leap to the next stage.

They now have a flood of data from so many startups all over the world, and this has allowed them to rank the most popular “startup ecosystems” worldwide. It’s no big surprise that the top three are Silicon Valley, New York and London.

Here’s the top 10 startup eco systems in the world -¬†Silicon Valley; New York City; London; Toronto; Tel Aviv; Los Angeles; Singapore; Sao Paulo; Bangalore; and Moscow.¬†You can see the full list of the top 25 startup eco systems here.

What’s more important is that the company also provided a head to head comparison of the top 3 eco-systems for 22 defining characteristics. Any city, region or ED agency looking to develop a hi-tech cluster and a favorable environment for startups has to take a look at the comparison.

For example, one of the criteria is “Availability of Capital.” The company says that, “On average Silicon Valley startups raise 2-3x more money in the first 3 stages of development: Discovery, Validation, and Efficiency. But in the scale stage, compared to Silicon Valley, New York City startups raise 27% more money and London startups raise 30% more money.”

About “Job Creation,” the company says that, “In the Efficiency and Scale stages, Silicon Valley startups create 11% more jobs than NYC startups and 38% more jobs than London startups.”

About “Work Ethic,” they say that, “Companies in Silicon Valley work 35% more than companies in New York City. In Silicon Valley teams work 9.5 hours a day on average vs. 8 hours in London and 7 in New York City.”

You can learn from all 22 characteristics, but just looking at the above three should be enough to explain why Silicon Valley is still the world’s best startup ecosystem ‚Äì they support ideas with money, hire more people and work harder.